


Cave Cave

by executrix



Category: Firefly
Genre: Fusion, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-13
Updated: 2011-03-13
Packaged: 2017-10-16 22:16:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/169925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wash is lookin' for love in all the wrong places...if you wear loud Hawaiian shirts, anywhere is the wrong places.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cave Cave

It took three courses of monosyllables by candlelight to convince Wash that his date with the delectable Corporal Alleyne was not an unqualified success. At least he did get to eat one and three quarter servings of Mangosteen Pavlova Surprise AlaMode. ("Isn't this glorious?" he burbled, after well-nigh inhaling the first spoonful. "Chow's chow," she said. "Here. You want this? Shouldn't be eatin' rich food anyway." "You have nothing to worry about—you look utterly splendid—a goddess…" "Huh. That ain't it, don't like to be too heavy on my feet 'round iffy terrain.")

And then the colorful native minstrels climbed onto the bandstand and embarked upon colorful minstrelsy. Wash was fairly convinced that he understood the swirling, stamping, hand-clapping folk dance. "Dance!" he said. "Let us trip terpsichoreanly and lightsome!"

"Yeah, right," she said. "Got to be gettin' back to vacuum the air exchange filters anyway. You wanna dance? Have a blast."

"I distinctly remember Captain Reynolds giving both of us the evening off—the **whole** evening…"

"Uh-HUH. Y'know, Hoban, them filters is important. Ain't but so much hot air the crew can survive."

It was the last straw when, a week later and two planets further on, Bester wiped his hands on a stained but pleasant-smelling rag. In fact, it smelled JUST like the bluebell cologne Wash had bought for Alleyne. "I dunno, Hoey, I thought maybe the problem was a grease bolus in the pintail feedline. So I poured in this degreaser stuff Zo' gave me, but it didn't do a damn thing. Could take a day, maybe two, maybe more, git 'er done. Want to head dirtside? I'm practically the Second in Command, y'know, I can give you a furlough."

Wash took this last statement with a carload of carborundum, but application to Captain Reynolds drew only a muttered, "Ain't no flyin' to be done anyways, knock y'self out."

Wash went to his bunk to comb his hair and put on a clean shirt. He reached under the bed, then sat down on it with Fillmore in one hand and Schuylerina in the other. "These people are in touch with the ancient, the primitive Knowledge," Fillmore said. "There are some things Man Is Not Meant to Know," Schuylerina said darkly. "Hahaha! I defy augury!" Fillmore said. Wash put them back in their shoebox and slid it under the bed again. They just about fit if tumbled into intimate proximity, which meant that a couple of rubber dinosaurs were getting more than he was.

It took hours of searching to find the tiny, foul-smelling garret, perched over an opium den. There was a bit of a language problem, but his normal optimism asserted itself, and by the time Wash left (much lighter of pocket) he was convinced that the apothecary-astrologer-necromancer finally understood what he wanted and granted his wish.

Then he sought out the nearest barbershop.

When Wash returned to the still-immobile vessel, he raced straight to find Zoe. There was some kind of fracas in the dining area. Wash breezed right past, hardly noticing it. The struggle involved the Captain and the lovely Companion whom Wash seldom saw because she generally stayed within her shuttle even when not engaged in entrepreneurialism. ("You ain't woman enough to take my man," Inara snarled. "Women like you're a dime a dozen, you can buy 'em anywhere," Mal sneered. He lunged forward, grabbed a hank of her hair, and tugged. "Buy this," she spat, catching him on the thigh with a pretty good roundhouse kick.)

"Ah, Zoe," Wash said, slowing down from a pelt to a stroll, decelerating rapidly enough to puff a little. "Notice anything different?"

"Me, I like it when things stay the same," Zoe said, not even sparing him a glance. "Like Jayne's aunt Raeleen always says, 'variety is the lice of life.'"

Wash was disappointed that his investment had so little return. But then, he wasn't sure how long it was supposed to take for the spell to take effect. He decided that he might as well go to his own cabin to wait and think—brood--about it.

"Surprise!" Bester yelled, leaping nude from Wash's bed and waving his engorged mechanichood. This was traumatic in and of itself but at least his arm blocked some of the illustrations.

"Fuck off!" Wash yelled, covering his eyes and throwing the nearest pair of pants on the floor at Bester.

Wash wanted to change the sheets, but he didn't have any other ones, so he stripped the bed and turned them upside-down and top to bottom and re-made the bed with hospital corners.

The next morning (Wash had always found the Captain to be rather remote, and now his manner was positively chilly), Captain Reynolds ordered Wash to pilot the second shuttle. Evidently a large number of big, heavy crates with contents Wash was content not to even think about had to be moved from point to point, preferably under cover of darkness, and whoever wanted them moved was under the impression that the whole lot could be shifted into Serenity (they had somehow gotten the impression that Serenity was mobile rather than a fixture) and moved at once rather than in, say, eight trips. Whoever wanted them to be moved was not only displeased with the service but armed and experiencing poor impulse control.

"C'mon," Jayne yelled, grabbing Wash' s hand and dragging him away from the line of fire.

"Jayne, I really don't think that's such a good idea…" Wash began, desiring to point out a few elementary principles about throwing grenades **outside** a cave. Jayne just grinned, his mouth being taken up by the pin and all, and tossed the grenade not nearly far enough. He spat out the pin, making a tiny ping that was taken up and amplified a thousandfold by a rockfall, sealing the entrance.

"Alone at last," Jayne said.

"I think we'd better head on back to the shuttle, and then dock with Serenity," Wash said. "Okay, easier said than done, but Rome, which is hope will not be precedential for that big pile of rocks over there, wasn't demolished in a day. Oh, and um. I'm not, not that I disapprove of others' lifestyle choices, but, to reiterate, not sly."

"I ain't neither," Jayne said. "But, y'know, there's just somethin' about a cave that just brings out the manly affection two fellas have for each other. Speakin' of which, this might be a good time—assumin' I can find my lighter that is, so's I can read it—to read you this poem which I wrote down yesterday but didn't have the right time to express it to you. Feelin's an' all." Jayne riffled through the spare ammunition, switchknives, protein capsules, and hangover remedies in his various pockets, eventually emerging with a folded sheet of paper and the lighter. He cleared his throat, and then declaimed:

"Roses is red, whateverthehell they look like,  
Violence is blue, even though, dunno, always makes **me** feel better,  
'Cept for my Mama, and that's totally different 'cause it would be all kinds of wrong and creepifyin' if it weren't,  
I never loved nobody but you."

"I'm…well, honored in that disgusted and terrified way you get so often. Or that I get so often since I signed up with this interplanetary Bedlam."

Jayne's eyebrows perked up at the mention of "bed," so Wash amended it to "loony bin," and added, "Jayne, don't you think that, well, some of the lines of the poem are not merely highly derivative but…a little long?"

"Awww, hell, even I know that it ain't about the first draft, it's all about the editin'."

Meanwhile, Inara moped around her shuttle, longing for Wash and trying to work up the courage to speak of her love and lay her eternal devotion at his feet. How resolute and handsome he looks in his brown coat, she mused. How his boots cling to his calves, and how broad his shoulders look when he loops his thumbs in his gunbelt and….Inara shook her head to clear it.

She happened to look up at the mirror on the ceiling. Inara frowned, displeased to see the look of dumb adoration she was so used to from the paying customers appear on her own face. And they, at least, had an investment to protect. "I can't be in love with Wash when I'm in love with…I mean, when I'm not in love with anybody," she said. "In fact, I don't think I've spent more than five minutes at a time in a room with Wash since he got here."

"That's it," she decided. "This must be some kind of love spell…or mumbo-jumbo…or…." And she activated her Cortex terminal and began dialling around until she found the Purple Pages listing for Honest Al's Alchemy (conveniently located one flight above the opium den). Then she waited until they found somebody who spoke pidgin Standard. "Ugly-moustache man say, want love spell. Big scary pretty girl Zoe. Not love him."

Inara tried out every language she could think of and was relieved to find the man on the other end of the link was a native Quenya speaker (it had been her special subject at the Companion Training House). "Oh, I say!" he said. "Lost in translation, eh? And here I thought he wanted everyone except this Zoe person to love him. Well, what should I do? I charged him extra for the Buyer Protection Plan."

"I suggest that you cancel the spell immediately, and let nature take its course," Inara said.

Jayne felt something click in his head. He gazed at Wash with new eyes, or rather, with the old eyes the way they were, back before his temporary possession. "Now look what you done, dumbass," he told Wash. "Gettin' us stuck in here—what was all that about?"

Wash began to remonstrate, then remembered a precious bit of wisdom from his brief Fry Cook tenure: The Large, Insane Customer Is Always Right. "Honestly, I don't know what I was thinking," he said. "Well, let's start moving rocks, shall we?" It crossed his mind briefly that perhaps he was dead and was going to be doing it forever, but at least this was more or less a flat surface.

A couple of hours later, they had moved enough rocks so that they could see daylight, and an hour or so after that they saw Mal, Zoe, and Bester, who had been wandering over the terrain near the site of the trade dispute, hallooing and hollering everyplace they thought there were comrades or perhaps ex-comrades to be found.

Bester had cobbled up a crane boom to move some of the rocks from the outside, and what with Jayne and Wash moving rocks from the inside and the other three hauling them from the outside, eventually an aperture was cleared. Jayne scrambled over the top of the barricade formed by the remaining stones. Wash leaned forward, and was clunked in the forehead by the hook on the crane. Mal and Zoe dragged him out again. They were going to load him on the mule but Bester discovered that the axle had cracked, so they had to improvise a stretcher out of their spare clothing and some tree limbs.

Mal, feeling scorned and heartbroken but for no reason he could remember, told Zoe to get Sleeping Beauty back to his castle. Zoe carried Wash over the threshold, dumped him on the bed, brushed her hands together, and turned on her heel and walked out.

Wash woke up an hour later, hung his aching head over the side of the bed and bellowed, "That is the **last** time I'm ever listening to you two!"

**Author's Note:**

> A fusion of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered." "Cave" is Latin for "beware."


End file.
